2017 Articles

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”A few days ago, I received an urgent warning from a longtime contact in Sweden. An industry associate had told him that the U.S. National Toxicology Program’s study on cell phone cancer risks was screwed up and essentially “useless.”

I was tempted to disregard it as nothing more than a corporate delusion. But the original source was said to be Maria Feychting, a professor at the Karolinska Institute and the vice chair of the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP). She had cast doubt on the landmark $25 million NTP RF–animal study in a talk presented at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences —the institute that awards the Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry every year.

A Reminiscence on the Occasion of Abe Liboff’s 90th Birthday

August 27, 2017

Today is Abe Liboff’s 90th birthday. Liboff is a physicist —he was the chairman of the physics department at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, for many years, and, before that, a professor at NYU. He used to be a coeditor of the journal, Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine.

As long as I have known him, Liboff has been asking questions about the world he sees all around. When possible, he runs experiments to test out his ideas. He continues to have a lively correspondence with those who share his interests in electromagnetic field effects, especially the role of the Earth’s magnetic field.

Back in 1984 when I first got to know him, Liboff had recently completed a two-year fellowship at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. He was back at Oakland but continued to collaborate with a psychologist at NMRI, John Thomas, who was doing research for the New York Power Line Project.

N.P. Singh, the Comet Assay and “Radiation Research”

April 27, 2017

Last updatedMay 24, 2017

Narendra P. Singh, known to friends and colleagues simply as NP, died last December at the age of 69. When his family wrote to me with the news, Singh’s wife asked me not to publish a tribute or an obituary at that time. I honored her request, but now, after a decent interval, I break my silence, in part to make good on a promise and to settle some unfinished business.

Singh was a proud and honest man; he was also gentle and unassuming. “He cannot tell a lie, even a white lie,” Henry Lai, his long-time collaborator at the University of Washington in Seattle, told me years ago. Perhaps most of all, Singh was a meticulous experimentalist who believed in the power of science.

Peer Reviewers Had Sought More Information;Cell Phone-Cancer Report Due in December

March 21, 2017

The National Toxicology Program (NTP) has changed course and will not —at least for the time being— publish its findings of increased DNA breaks among rats exposed to cell phone radiation as a stand-alone paper.

The DNA study, which is part of NTP’s landmark experiment showing that RF radiation can lead to tumors in the brains and hearts of laboratory animals, will now be incorporated in NTP’s Technical Report on the $25 million project, the NTP has told Microwave News.

The Pentagon wants to know more about how cells use electromagnetic radiation to talk to each other.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as DARPA or ARPA, is embarking on a new program, called RadioBio, to determine whether cells are able to exchange information with EM signals and, if so, what the cells are saying and how they do it.

Facts don’t seem to mean much anymore. We live in a “post-truth” time. So much so that post-truth was recently named the international word of the year. As 2017 opened for business, a stark example of the new reality came to our attention courtesy of Paolo Boffetta, an Italian epidemiologist now at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.

In an interview with Fox News, Boffetta said that the link between power lines and childhood leukemia had been debunked. In response to a question as to whether it was safe for a pregnant woman to live next to a “huge power line,” Boffetta advised that there was no reason for concern.

According to Boffetta, the 1979 classic study by Nancy Wertheimer and Ed Leeper pointing to higher rates of leukemia among children living near high-current power lines had been contradicted by “newer and better” studies, carried out with improved methodology. Boffetta sent a clear message that “very high exposures” to power line EMFs are safe for pregnant women and children.